


Calligraphy

by Azdaema



Category: Firefly
Genre: 5 + 1, Drabble Collection, Etymology, Ficlet Collection, Gen, Languages and Linguistics, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-03 05:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14562087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azdaema/pseuds/Azdaema
Summary: When it comes to practicing calligraphy, River would rather write Simon's name than her own.





	1. Chapter 1

She sits on the table in the infirmary, hunched over, writing something on her lap.

"River?" her brother asks cautiously.

She doesn't look up.

He moves slowly and carefully, like she's a wild animal who might suddenly lash out and bite him.

譚西蒙譚西蒙譚西蒙

She has written the same three characters again and again. He can only read the most recently written few—the others have bleed, their lines turning into blobs.

"Mèimei, what are you doing?" he asks in an oddly tense, careful voice.

"Xīméng. Shiii-muuung," she says, Anglicizing the pronunciation and drawing it out long and mocking. "It's not right. It doesn't mean Simon."

"Xīméng is the typical Sinicization of Simon," he says cautiously, "and the one I've used all my life. You know that."

"Simon, Shim'on, Hebrew, ‘he has heard.’ You heard me and you came, and Simon means that, and Xīméng doesn't, it means nothing, and—" She speaks faster and faster, her voice rising with hysteria, until she breaks off, at a loss for words. She sobs, a high, breaking sound, then grips her hands over her ears. Her stylus falls, clattering across the infirmary floor. "Tā tīng shuō, tīng shuō."

The instant her stylus is out of her hand, Simon darts forward and wraps his arms around her. She shakes, sobbing, but doesn't fight him

"Shhhh, shhhh," he murmurs into her hair.

The stylus is underfoot, and Simon kicks it away. It skids across the linoleum floor until it comes to a stop in the far corner; a small surgical scalpel, still wet with River's blood.

She curls into a ball around herself, and Simon holds her. The characters are still bleeding, where she has cut them into the flesh of her thighs, just above the knees.

Later, Simon will bandage the wounds. The cuts aren't too deep—River was always good at calligraphy, and she knows how to use just the right about of pressure. But right now, he just holds her and she shakes against his chest, sobbing, "Tīng shuō, tīng shuō."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just finished my first year of Mandarin Chinese class. Could the Chinese in this fic be flawed? _Most definitely._ However, it _is_ based on _some_ actual knowledge, not just googling.
> 
> Because the sound systems, writing systems, and naming systems of Chinese and English are just so different, pretty much everyone has both a Chinese name and an English name. In Chinese, the surname is almost always 1 syllable, and a given name can be 1 or 2. The surname goes before the given name.
> 
>   * Their surname, Tam, is the Cantonese reading of 譚. The Mandarin reading of that character Tán.
>     * It also happens to be _my_ Chinese surname. It was just given to me by my Chinese teacher because my English surname also starts with T, but _you should've seen me_ when I googled it and found it it's also Tam.
>   * 西蒙 (xīméng) is a pretty standard Sinicization of the name Simon.
>   * 江 (jiāng) and 河 (hé) both mean "river." I used Jiāng as River's Chinese name in this fic, just because I think it sounds prettier.
> 

> 
> Also: I'm using traditional characters in this story, because traditional is usually used for calligraphy.
> 
> At the end, River says 听说/聽說 (tīng shuō) which means something like "to hear tell that." I don't have any knowledge of Hebrew, so it's a three-step translation, from שִׁמְעוֹן to he has heard to 听说/聽說. It's probably not the best translation, but, well... it's the translation I'm capable of at this time.


	2. 5 + 1 Drabbles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five times—five ways—River wrote Simon's name, and one time Simon wrote River's.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was thinking about the adage "constraints breed creativity." Fanfic, by building off other stories, has constraints from the very beginning. But then through things like the 5 + 1, or fests, or prompts, people seek even more constraints. I was intrigued by this idea. I wanted to try my hand a very constrained form of writing. So I combined 5 + 1 with the drabble, plus prompts. Each section is exactly 100 words. The first 3 were my own ideas, and the latter 3 were prompts.
> 
> Thank you to shipcestuous for boosting the signal on this, and thank you to everyone who gave me prompts!
> 
> For the purposes of counting words in these drabbles, I'm applying an English-like definition of "a word" to the Chinese. For example, Simon's name is written with 3 characters: 譚西蒙 (Tán Xīméng). I'm counting it as 2 words, the surname name and personal name, 譚 (Tán) and 西蒙 (Xīméng), like it would be in English. Likewise, 妹妹 (mèimei) is 1 word.
> 
> If you hover your cursor over a Chinese word in this fic, a little explanation will show up :)

### 1\. Water

The courtyard's paving stones are warm underfoot, the morning air breezy and light. Grandfather watches fondly from his chair in the shade as River does water calligraphy. She's small, and the brush is large, but she wields it deftly all the same.

"Jiāngjiāng," Grandfather calls to her, "try writing your own name."

"I already did," she responds without looking up, gesturing to the far side of the courtyard. He looks, but the characters there have already dried up and vanished.

"Try it again."

Sighing, she does so—exactly once—before continuing on.

譚西蒙  
譚西蒙  
譚江  
譚西蒙

### 2\. Fire

Osiris's dual moons hang swollen in the sky, simultaneously full for the first time in five years.

The party spreads across the veranda. They eat mooncakes, and the adults crow when River explains they're the cultural and culinary descendants of the mooncakes of Earth-That-Was, eaten for Zhōng Qiū Jié.

When Mother hands out sparklers, River darts through the guests to find her brother. She takes him by the hand, dragging him to the far corner. There, in a spray of light and laughter, eyes glittering with sparks and face aglow in the firelight, she writes in the air:

譚西蒙

### 3\. Air

She'd turned her ankle dancing. It's been a week now, and she no longer needs to ice the sprain, but Dr. Malik had said that she must wait a whole month before dancing again.

River would've ignored her if not for Simon. He claimed Dr. Malik was right; he begged River to do her physical therapy.

And so River sits, with her foot propped up on a second chair like a footrest. "Write the alphabet," Dr. Malik had said. "Imagine your big toe is the tip of a pencil."

But the alphabet is boring, so River instead writes:

譚西蒙

### 4\. Berries

The sun is almost—but not quite—uncomfortably hot overhead as they cross the border into the Cambersons' estate. River scales the fence first, with preternatural grace. Simon gets stuck halfway and lands hard, wincing.

River darts ahead of her brother, but in her wake, he is the one who spies the hodgeberries. The bushes are huge. "They've grown wild," River says, and Simon isn't so sure, but it's more fanciful that way so he plays along.

With lips stained, she lays berries out in lines, like beadwork or embroidery, each point coming together to form the characters:

譚西蒙

### 5\. Dust

River isn't seen much planetside. After all, their captain said, "She makes things not be smooth," and he's right. So River doesn't get the chance to touch every world they land on.

But when she does—every time she first steps onto a world—she always turns her face first up to the sun, and then down to the earth. Lets the sunlight gather in her hair and the dust gather on her bare feet.

And then, in the dust of the planet's crust, she writes—using her toe, and the skill made easy by years of practice—

譚西蒙

### +1. Stars

The black scares him, River knows. When they look into space she sees the stars, while Simon sees the blackness between them. But he's come to the bridge with her anyway, because she asked him too. She squeezes his hand, to make sure he knows she's grateful.

After a long while, he whispers, "It's like a river."

"A river of stars?"

"Yes." Then his breath catches in his throat as he sees it. "Jiāng. Look."

He raises a hand, pointing to the three bright stars like the 氵 radial, then outlines 工 with his fingertip.

江, written in stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   1. Water calligraphy is totally a thing. See [here](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bluealpha/118244138).
>   2. That one was inspired by the Diwali scene in _I Am Roshni_.
>   3. I’m not a doctor and I claim no real medical knowledge, but writing the alphabet with your toe is actual physical therapy someone I know had to do.
>   4. Thanks to [Myrickman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Myrickman) for the prompt "berries."
>   5. Thanks to [intothecest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intothecest) for the prompt "the dust/dirt of every world they land on."
>   6. Thanks to [brotherskywalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brotherskywalker) for the prompt "write in the stars."
> 

> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who gave me prompts. Since I only had 3 more to write for this, I picked the ones that most sparked my imagination right away. (I might later write some of the others.)


End file.
